School swimming lessons

[batmancave]

Can anyone tell me what my child needs to do to pass their swim lessons at school?

He can swim 25m and has a certificate, but the certificate doesn't say if he's passed or not.

I will check with school on Monday but just wondered if anyone else knew.

I don't think there's a pass as such anymore.
They move up levels and the level will probably be emblazoned on the certificate but no 'pass'.
When my DC have moved up a level I just presume they are competent at what the previous level consists of.
My DC have school and private lessons.
Neither have ever 'passed'.

I believe they recently changed the national curriculum for swimming. I think distance is one criteria, but survival, water safety maters too. Certainly kids are signed off, or not, at our school because there is a point where some of a class still need to go, but the rest don’t. Ask the teacher about it - if they use a leisure centre and teacher then they may need to check with them.

'passed' what ?

By passed I mean he doesn't have to go to the swimming lessons anymore.

I know there are stages but this is the only time he's received a certificate. That's why I thought he might have completed what he needs to do.

Some children in his class have already completed their swimming and no longer do swimming lessons with the school.

I assumed all schools followed the same criteria.

We have to put out the information about the number of year 6 children who could swim 25m. In fact OFSTED picked us up on not putting that information on our website a few years ago (yep, really).
Many schools just allow all children in a year group to swim until the end of their turn. DS swam for the county and still did school swimming lessons.

Oh. IME, children all go for their term, or 2 terms or whatever their 'allocation' is. I've not come across a school that has the staffing to split a class, with some going swimming and some not.

At our school all of Y3 go all year. They get a cert at the end that says what they can do.

Once children can confidently swim 25m they do a different activity in our school. This reduces the swim class size for those still needing to be able to swim.

Putting pass rates on your website is not a statutory requirement unless you were spending PE premium on swimming, in which case you would report the improvement rates.

Same as a pp, all of our year 3s go swimming regardless of their level. It’s just for one term. Then those who still can’t swim by the end of it join the year below for their swimming lessons the following year.

No passes or certificates; but someone must be using some kind of criteria to define ‘can’t swim’. I think it’s pretty low though; ds is terrible at swimming and he wasn’t picked out as one who needed more lessons.

Presumably the certificate means he can swim 25m.

Ours go in year 3 and typically a good half the class can competently swim 25m before they start as most have private lessons at some point. There's a handful that start off struggling to get across 10m, and about 8 or so that can sort of swim but need to refine their technique to develop their stamina in recognised strokes. We do have a higher ratio of swimmers than the schools that come in before and after from looking at the distribution of the groupings.

By the end of a year, the nearly the entire class could swim a length, with just a couple sneaking a crafty grab at the wall on the way, but all being able to at least swim from the deep end to the shallow.

They made a massive difference to DS, complimenting his private lessons (being more focused on technique than distance). Compared to the class, he was middling at the start and over the year began doing monthly 25m in his private lessons. He got moved up into the lengths group at school and quickly built up stamina and in weeks could do 400m in half an hour, plus working on other skills like life saving that he hasn't yet in his own lessons. No mean feat with his dyspraxia.

If they stopped taking the 25m+ swimmers, there'd be no point in hiring a coach to get them there!

We had the same opt out of swimming as QueenofLouisiana said for DS y5. In all honesty, I asked him if he wants to do the school swimming as he is a confident swimmer. Answer was yes, as all his friends go as well.

DD (Y6) goes to swimming with school all year round. It's a tiny village school, 42 pupils in total. It's a bit of a ballache tbh, as DD can swim competently, but hates the school lessons. There's a boy in her class who swims competitively, but still needs to participate.
In the school I work in, another small rural school with 57 pupils, it seems to be a different system - as soon as they achieve the required standard, they can stop. That seems so much more sensible, it means the coaches can concentrate on those who need it.
So, there isn't a national standard, it's up to the individual school it seems?

DS2 swims competitively. He still got swimming lessons at school this year. They were utterly pointless for him, but he'd rather have been in the pool than out of it. The swimming teacher got him to demonstrate things for the other kids a lot of the time.

There is a national standard for the end of KS2 but it must be hard for schools when some kids come in way beyond that standard and others can't swim. They don't necessarily have the staff for only some of a class to be doing swimming while others stay behind at school.

My Ds ‘s school used to do swimming for the year but for my son’s year some were stopped ( my Ds included) as there were so many none swimmers. My Ds hated them anyway so did outdoor activities instead